Chapter 9 #2
I kept going because now that I’d started, I needed the whole truth out in the air where neither of us could pretend it hadn’t been said.
“It’s in your DNA. You notice one thing.
All men do it. It’s the pattern. You bring a girl a gift, wrapped up nicely and then I’m the bitch if I don’t melt.
I’m ungrateful and difficult because I don’t give points for trying because the real reason all this is done is to find an underhanded way to get into my heart. ”
“It wasn’t like that.”
“You don’t get to say that.”
His eyes sharpened. “I think I do.”
“No.” I stepped closer to the table, closer to him without exactly meaning to. “You don’t get to tell me how a gift lands when I’m the one receiving it.”
He stopped in a different way then, like I was breaking him. I was breaking me as my entire body pinged with warning signs.
“And how,” he asked quietly, “does it land.”
I could say I loved them and show tears. I was probably going to cry when this was over and part of me wanted to be grateful about it all.
But if we were doing this, doing it, all I’d have was glasses. So if I was going to spend another forty-eight hours beside this man pretending things we were dating, then at least one of us had to start saying the uncomfortable parts cleanly.
“It lands like pressure,” I said. “It lands like you care about me and it’s not all some big lie. And when it ends it gives you the option to say you were nice to me.”
His whole face shifted. He looked at the box. Then back at me.
“That,” he said after a beat, “wasn’t my intention.”
“I know.”
“You keep saying that like it helps.”
“It doesn’t.”
For one second neither of us moved. Then, very softly, he said, “I don’t know what to do with that.”
That sentence hit me harder than the gift itself.
A man standing in a salt-warm garden telling me he’d wanted to do something nice and now had no idea what to do with that nice had not landed cleanly.
I looked away first.
“I don’t either,” I admitted.
The confession made the whole moment worse and better. At least the truth was out where both of us could see it.
He rested one hand on the stone table but made no move toward the box. I wasn’t sure what I would have done if he’d tried to take it back. Or leave it with me.
“I didn’t buy it to control you,” he said with a sigh like he wasn’t sure what else to say.
His voice had gone lower.
“I bought it because I crossed a line and thought you might accept something small as an apology.”
That sentence slid straight into my soul and made everything worse.
“You cannot say things like that to me after giving me a gift and expecting me to stay balanced.”
“I’m not expecting balance.”
I stared and maybe I should have stepped back. Instead I stayed where I was and said, “I don’t know what to do with you when you’re sincere.”
Something almost like amusement flashed through his face and was gone.
“Neither do I,” he said.
My laugh came out shaky enough to annoy me. “That’s not reassuring.”
“It wasn’t meant to be.”
I looked at the box. The glasses were beautiful inside.
I imagined them on my little counter. Full of dark tea with sugar melting slowly at the bottom. A piece of his world sitting in mine like it belonged there.
And I also couldn’t make myself push the box back at him.
“I’m not taking this because I’ve changed the rule,” I said finally as I inched closer to the box.
His gaze didn’t leave mine. “I understand.”
“I’m taking it because throwing it at your face would probably make me feel awful later.”
“That’s a start. You don’t want to murder me”
The problem with Xerses, I was learning, was not that he brought out my extremes when I was confused. If he’d been thoughtless, I could’ve dismissed him.
If he’d been all ego, with that rich-man expectation of being adored, I could’ve written him into the same file as every other beautiful problem with too much money and not enough emotional discipline. Instead I had this.
He had walked past a shop, saw two tea glasses, and bought them because he’d thought of me. How exactly was I supposed to behave sanely around that?
“You’re thinking too hard,” he said.
I blinked. “Why is that always your opening line when I’m trying not to drown.”
“Because it’s usually true.”
“You say these things like I should find them charming.”
“Do you?”
Yes. Damn. I glanced at him. He returned my gaze. There was no easy moral high ground left. I shook my head once. “You are exhausting.”
“And you’re still here.”
I picked up the box again and held it against my hip.
“I’m going to say thank you,” I said. “I’ll keep them.”
His shoulders relaxed but somehow that made it worse.
“But,” I went on before he could say anything, “this doesn’t mean the rule is gone.”
“I know.”
Tears were forming. I willed them away. “And it doesn’t mean I understand why you did this.”
His gaze dropped to the box once and came back up.
“It means,” he said, “you understand that it was an impulse because I wanted to make you happy.”
The words hit me in the center of the chest.
I almost reminded him that he’d publicly claimed me three days ago and none of us should pretend as lies confused me.
Instead I stood there in the garden, holding tea glasses I’d never meant to accept, looking at a man who was beautiful enough to be a problem and sincere enough to be worse, and said the only honest thing left. “It means I’m trying.”
That terrible, bright line between us where romance stopped being a joke and started becoming something with weight. He stepped back first.
And God help me, somehow this moment was more intimate than the entire weekend.
We went back inside after that, and I carried the box to my room like contraband.
I set the box on the bed and stared at it for a long time.
Then, because I was a fool and because my life had become one long series of emotional experiments in bad judgment, I opened it again. The glasses caught the light from the window and threw it back light mixed with gold.
I touched one rim lightly with my fingertip and let myself tell the truth, just once, in the privacy of the room with no audience at all.
I liked them.
I liked that he’d thought of me.
And in the end this was all I’d ever really have. Memories and a pair of cups.